The invention relates to the field of computer-implemented methods and computer systems for helping users when applying business process patterns.
A process pattern encapsulates a solution to a specific but re-occurring problem. Patterns are created by e.g. observing (or “mining”) a variety of solutions that different people have created over time when working on the same problem. A pattern encapsulates common features to these solutions, yet ensuring that the problem is solved. Examples of collections of patterns are the object-oriented design patterns by Gamma et al. (see E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson, and J. Vlissides: Design patterns: Abstraction and reuse of object-oriented design, In Proceedings of ECOOP'93, Springer-Verlag), the software architecture patterns by Buschmann et al. (see e.g. Schmidt, D. C. and Buschmann, F. 2003. Patterns, frameworks, and middleware: their synergistic relationships. In Proceedings of the 25th international Conference on Software Engineering (Portland, Oreg., May 3-10, 2003). International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, D.C., 694-704, and references therein), and the workflow patterns by Russell, van der Aalst and co-workers, see e.g. www.workflowpatterns.com, as of Dec. 4, 2009).
Besides, Beringer et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 7,197,740 B2) describes pattern-based software design where business process patterns (amongst other types of patterns) are selected from a set of available patterns. Specifically, the pattern that best matches the requirements for the software application to be developed is selected. After selection, the pattern is configured according to requirements by mapping the requirements to the pattern.
Next, Kobayashi et al. (T. Kobayashi, S. Ogoshi and N. Komoda, A business process design method for applying workflow tools, in: Proc. of 1997 IEEE International Conference on System, Man, and Cybernetics, Orlando, Fla., USA (October 1997) pp. 2314-2319 describes a specific process design method using Winograd's commitment network pattern. The result is a specific process design. A concept of “business process design pattern” is introduced as a basic structure for the target business independent of the problem change.
Software AG/IDS Scheer has recently released a solution (in their modeling tool) that allows for selecting a part of a process model and creating a fragment out of the selected part that is stored in a separate view from where it can be reused by dragging and dropping on the editor canvas, see http://www.ariscommunity.com/users/frank-weyand/2009-08-25-building-your-models-using-bricks-fragments, as retrieved on Nov. 30, 2009.
The modeling tool of the AristaFlow® BPM Suite requires users to select a modeling element and then provides a set of editing operations that are valid for the current selection. The selection of model elements, which is restricted to a single connection or a single element, describes the context for the operation. This approach ensures that a consistent model can be transformed into another consistent model, see http://dbis.eprints.uni-ulm.de/488/1/Reichert—02—09.pdf, as retrieved on Nov. 30, 2009.
P. Hruby (Model-Driven Design using Business Patterns, Springer 2006) introduces business patterns describing relations between agents, resources, and actions. These patterns differ significantly from process patterns as defined above. Here the patterns are represented in an object-oriented (class diagram-like) representation, from which the resulting data base application is directly derived.